SunStar
by Ella Diver Sophis
Summary: Elanor Gamgee is sleeping ine the garden on Midsummer Eve.


She had never met him, and has never seen his face, They lived in his old house. Frodo had been Sam's greatest companion - closer in his heart than her mother, she reckoned. Frodo was long gone.  
Tonight was gloriously beautiful, even for a Shire summer night, because tonight was High Summer. Tonight was Midsummer's Eve! The stars glinted through the deep blue waters of heavens like tiny far-off gems dropped into the sky. The air was warm, the breeze was cool, and the lawngrass was dry. Elanor had been lying outside with her brothers and sisters. As day had faded and evening risen, each had quietened, and by the time the moon had climbed to the tops of the trees, even her brother was in bed.  
Now Elanor was alone, and the breeze whispered through the gooseberry thorns. A chill ran along her bare arms. She rolled herself up in the rug she was lying on, and watched the stars.  
Above her eyes, they say in patterns and pictures. They looked roughly scattered, wilfully at random, until you knew their names. Sam had sewn them together for her, and she recited their names in her head. If you knew the names of the stars, if you knew what their were laid out for, you had them under you spell.  
  
Valacirca, Helluin,  
Menelmacar, Wilwarin,  
Anarrima,   
Carnil & Luinil,  
Nenar & Lumbar,-  
  
Elanor thought she saw a movement in the hawthorn at the hedge. In fact, it was a hobbit-lad.  
He was fairly plain, it had to be admitted, with soft brown curls on his head and toes like the older hobbits. He was only in his tweens as her father called it, the irresponsible late teens and twenties before thirty-three (a hobbit's coming-of-age). Elanor herself was seventeen, an her daddy was already teasing her, telling her how coquettish and petulant she was becoming. She didn't mind it, because secretly she knew that Mr Gamgee rathered liked impish children. (Rosie Cotton, on the other hand, most definitely did not).  
He was, as she had already noticed, rather plain, but he had eyes brighter than Luinil that shone like sapphires in the moonlight. She could only gaze at him as he bumbled towards her, smiling amiabl, apparently oblivious to her gape-jawed fish-mouthed bare-toothed wonder.  
"Catching flies?," he asked with the familiar teasing tone that her father sometimes employed.  
With gentle white fingers, he pressed her mouth shut and laughed at her, lying down beside her on his back. He admired the stars. She admired him.   
What high, elvish cheekbones he had, she mused to herself; rather like brightly glowing full moons. And his eyelashes were dark, like long lines of fluttering shadow on his pale skin. His fingers had been icy-cold on her nose. He made her tingle.  
"What are you staring at?" he whispered, still watching the stars. He spoke to gently, it was as if he didn't want to wake them, to disturb the sky to dawn.  
In spite of the cold, she blushed.  
"Nothing," she said, turning her face up at the dark sky without moving her eyes. After a moment, he turned to her, startling her with those delightful blue eyes, and added,  
"You're still at it."  
He smiled and so she laughed. At first she was embarrassed, but after a moment, he laughed with her, and she felt better.  
Elanor shuffled into his shoulder, feeling friendlier now, and his arm slid round her. He was still cold, but he flickered with warmth occasionally, like a white candle in the blue breeze.  
  
Then he spoke to her of stars; and of Elbereth Gilthoniel, the Queen of Stars, she who first lit the night.  
"She who taught the torches to burn bright," he said proudly, and then he sang a song in elvish. His voice was soft, and it swelled secretively on the night air, dying away among the soughing elders on the meadow.  
Elanor began to drift into sleep. His fingers toyed with her fair hair with the lightness of dream.  
"That," he said finally, almost to himself, "is Helluin, the star that never strays. Fixed, it is, firmer than the sun and stronger than the seasons. The star that won't wanders no more." A dark cloud came over the moon, and the lawn was plunged into darkness.   
  
The wind suddenly threw a gust down and yanked the dreamy girl awake. Her companion had disappeared in a breath, and she couldn't see a thing. There were no lights in the house, and the wind blustered through the gooseberry thorns with ripe hunger.   
  
The cloud pulled away, and the garden was flooded with cool moonlight again. The wind whirled away.  
"Ell?," came a voice from within the house  
"Dad," she said, smiling. She was tangled up in the blanket. "What are you doing out here?"  
He didn't answer her, and instead surveyed his garden, from hawthorn hedge over lillies, roses, peonies, strawberries, apple trees and bleeding hearts, and over the hill into the inpenetrable shadow of the farther fields, recognisable to him even in the pitch dark. The landscape fitted his eyes, knowing its pattern from memory.  
"Daddy?"  
His gaze settled on Elanor, and he loosened the frown from his brow.  
"Thought I heard a voice, my little Sun-star," he said, and after a pause, smiled to himself. "Come on now," he said to her, offering his hand, "it's midnight, and I don't want your sleepy head to be too heavy to lift off the pillow tomorrow."  
Slowly, with the heavy gait of a deep sleeper, her father walked back into the dark doorway and down the corridor back to bed. He looked tired, and the moonlight had slipped unkindly under his eyes in the shape of pearly-grey crescent moons. Sam was getting old.  
She picked herself up, aand folded the blanket, taking one more look at the starry heavens from the doorarch. One star caught her eye, glinting ever-bight.  
"I wish I may, I wish I might," she murmured to herself, still flame-warm inside from Mr. Helluin's dappled touch. 


End file.
